A business information, business intelligence, and/or enterprise system can improve an organization's ability to monitor and manage data in a complex business environment. Such a system (e.g., a system offered by Business Objects SA of Levallois-Perret, France and SAP SE of Walldorf, Germany) can provide applications and tools that allow users to monitor, retrieve, view and manipulate business information, including business warehouse data stored and maintained as part of an organization's business operations. The business information may, for example, be associated with a number of different product lines, profit values, customer groups, fiscal years, distribution regions, product costs, product quantities, revenues, and/or dates. The business information may be stored in, and retrieved from, a variety of “data sources” (e.g., relational, transactional, hierarchical, multidimensional (e.g., OLAP), object oriented databases, etc.). Further, the data sources may include tabular data (e.g., spreadsheets, delimited text files), data tagged with a markup language (e.g., XML data), transactional data, unstructured data (e.g., text files, screen scrapings), hierarchical data (e.g., data in a file system, XML data), files, reports, documents, etc. and any other data source accessible through an established protocol (e.g., Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC)).
A spreadsheet is a table of values placed in cells arranged in rows and columns. Each value/cell may have a predefined relationship to the other values/cells. Spreadsheet applications (sometimes referred to simply as spreadsheets) are computer programs (e.g., Appleworks™, Microsoft Excel™, Lotus 1-2-3™, Google Spreadsheets™, etc.) which allow a user to create and manipulate spreadsheets electronically.
An example spreadsheet application or tool may be configured to allow a user to, for example, retrieve stored information from a data source and manipulate, analyze or process the information (e.g., to create a display or report). The user may, for example, import a particular set of information into the spreadsheet application by entering a name or identifier into various cells of a spreadsheet to define what information should be associated with the cells, rows, and/or columns of the spreadsheet. For example, the user may associate a particular row with a measure such as profit or cost and a number of columns with different fiscal years, where the years are associated with a dimension.
Relationships between cells in a spreadsheet may be defined by formulas, which often can be complex. The complexity of the relationships between cells may make manipulation and visualization of the data in the spreadsheet cumbersome.
Consideration is now being given to systems and methods for incorporation, manipulation and visualization of data in a spreadsheet.